Redefine Divinity
by silent-voices
Summary: A collection of short fics focusing on different myths. Written for the 100moods challenge on LJ
1. Moment

A/N: Written for the 100moods challenge over on LJ. Prompt 33: Enamored

Pairing: unrequited Actaion/Artemis

Rating: PG-13

Warning: implied femmeslash

**Moment**

For one endless, glorious moment, all is silent and he looks at her. Trying to keep his balance by hugging the tree nearest to him, he leans toward the glistening lake where she's floating in the water. His ears are pounding, not only with the speed of the hunt still present in his limbs, but also with the rush of enamoured blood that explodes inside him.

Artemis' nymphs, speckled with the sunlight filtering through the trees, laugh with soft, tinkling voices – much like rivers themselves – and they tend to her shining body with their hands. One of them catches water in the cup of her hands and lets it flow out over the goddess' hair. As if he's standing in a tunnel with only her magnified image on the other side, Actaion sees how the drops cling to her lips and run off her cheeks as she smiles. A second nymph takes the place of the first, folding her hands around Artemis' brow and touching her head in such a way that the goddess closes her eyes and lets out an almost inaudible sound of contentment. Around her the other women wash each other's hair and adorn it with the small white flowers that float on the surface of the lake. They bathe each other's shoulders with gentle, slow movements and share soft, intimate smiles in the small space between their faces. Short, fleeting kisses are exchanged between Artemis' servants; one of the nymphs drags her top lip gently over the wet exposed flesh of another's neck, while yet another rests her hands on her shoulder blades, massaging them.

All this is lost on Actaion. He stares at the sun that is Artemis' body in the pool, at her nipples that are lapped against by the movement ripples of the water. Where her servants touch her, she flushes red. Her body is like a shell; open, accepting.

Then, she suddenly looks him straight in the face and all of the relaxation drains out of her body. The moment is lost. She screams as her maidens scramble around her to protect her from his eyes – and she yells and she yells and something's happening to him and he needs to run away now –

He can hear his hounds barking in the distance.


	2. Shoulders

Prompt 6: Apathetic

**Shoulders**

The only thought he still has is _a way to stop the itch_. It ends there; there _is_ no way to stop the itch. It's not _a way to stop the itch might be_ or _I know a way to stop the itch_. He doesn't know a way to stop the itch, he only knows the word _itch i t c h_. The letters bound about inside his skull.

The only feeling he stills has is **the itch**. It ends there; there is no action that could change his mood, no consequence of the itch. The itch doesn't travel, it's settled at that one horrible, horrible point between his shoulder blades where all his nerves have bundled. His muscles are strained between his shoulders – it's where all the weight is – and now there is that itch, that scorching hot searing itch. It's everything he still knows. The pain in his shoulders has gone, has been gone for millennia (he's not even sure he still has shoulders: maybe they slid off his body and the earth is keeping itself up?) but **the itch** stays.

Between his shoulders rivers flow. The hot sands of the desert press down on his body (it's the cause of the itch, but he doesn't know this). People kiss and kick. Babies die. Women bless themselves with oil and perfume. Men clap each other on the shoulder, pulling the boats out to sea. Faces clouded in incense predict the future. Between his shoulders, people try to reach the itches between their shoulder blades in that horrible spot you can't reach. Their husbands, their wives and sisters and parents laugh at them, and scratch for them. They frown because of the ridicule, shrug their itch-free shoulders and continue what they were doing. The people of the desert wash themselves with the sand that's hurting him. The sun, smiling down on all of them. Except one.

Atlas.

His itch.


	3. Carrying

Prompt 96: Touched

**Carrying **

Being a father brings consequences.

Zeus remembers when he asked Hephaistos to cleave his skull in two to rid him of that pounding headache that was making the clouds crackle with electricity. Hephaistos complied, unknowingly being the soot-stained midwife for one of Olympos's strangest births. Athena was born on the edge of a blade and that's how she's lived ever since, springing from her father's brow in all of her glory. Do gods ever experience childhood? Zeus finds that he can't remember his, though the humans on earth tell each other stories about it.

Athena, alongside with Dionysos, is the most intimate of Zeus's children. Both were born twice – once; being pushed outside of their mothers, twice; being pushed outside of their father. Zeus feels strangely responsible for their somewhat paradoxical godly duties (Athena, with all of her wisdom and yet her love for war – Dionysos, the blurry god of wine and yet the only one that rivals Apollo's orderly reason) as if being born twice has automatically given them two lives. It makes sense in a way. Zeus has felt the confusing, dizzying, awe-inspiring excess of emotion that comes with pregnancy. He has many children; he has only truly carried two of them.

He feel strongly about all of his children, but finds that it is wearing to keep a fatherly eye on all of his descendants. He has too much of them. Confusingly, he's bursting with pride over every achievement his mortal or immortal children accomplish and yet he wishes they were never born. Being a parent has been more than following his lustful loins and watching the consequences from afar. He hadn't expected that. He hadn't foreseen the powerful rush of relief as one of his lovers survives a childbirth, no matter how pestered by Hera. He hadn't foreseen the love that infuses him every time, every time again, like a shock running up his nerves, when he sees his children growing up and being loved and making him proud. He hadn't expected wanting to rip the earth apart in fury when one of his is being treated unfairly.

He doesn't like things to happen that he hasn't foreseen. He loves his children yet hates them deeply. He falls in love with them whenever he sees how much they mirror their mothers or himself. He hates how his mortal children expect things from him he can't provide. He hates it just as much when they expect nothing. The depth of the influence they have on him is something he can't stand.

He takes care of them in ways they don't understand or better yet: don't notice. He refuses to make their lives flow smoothly – instead he lets fate do its job and only nudges his sons and daughters on earth gently into the right direction now and then. Mostly he helps them get up again when they fall. He's not supposed to play favourites, even though he does. He tries to do it subtly.

Sipping ambrosia, he oversees his worldly empire rising and falling in green plains away from Olympos. Apollo is sending his chariot to the west and Zeus enjoys the last rays of sunshine on his brow. His children on earth and mountain alike are preparing for bed.

They may not know it, but he's watching over them.


	4. Vertigo

Prompt 87. Scared

**Vertigo **

Ironically, Hera is deeply afraid of heights.

She was born, pushed out of her giant mother's wide and deep birth canal and found herself suspended in mid-air. Her grandfather was Ouranos, the sky. Her grandmother was Gaia, the earth. At the time of her birth, the two were in the process of the ultimate divorce. Heaven and earth were not connected at that time. Rhea, being upset by the prospect of losing another child to the greed of her husband, was too preoccupied with her own misery to notice her newborn floating about. The umbilical cord still intact, Hera slowly rotated in a space that was distinctly in pain, ripped apart as it was by Ouranos en Gaia's marital conflict. This is the most intense memory Hera has (as if the waiting in her father's stomach with her brothers and sisters, trying to avoid being digested, had troubled her sense of observation from that point onward). Ever since, she needs the steadiness of flat earth beneath her feet.

She hates being afraid. She is a queen and a goddess and it doesn't do to have the fears of humans. So she confronts her fear time and time again, and makes a sport out of leaning forward on Olympos. She watches the humans below and tries not to give into to the horrible sinking in her entire body. She descends to earth in the wake of Iris to bless and curse people. Every time she balances on the edge. She never falls. She only falls in her dreams.

The beginning of the turning point occurs when she looks into the face of her son and feels a deep, black, crackling disgust fill her mother's heart where love should lie. Hephaistos is nothing short of a monster, slimy with birth residue and scarred permanently. If she were not a goddess, she would think it was the punishment of the gods for the place of Hephaistos' conception – she seduced Zeus on the slopes of Olympos that fall away to make way for air. Zeus had to hold on to tender leaves of grass to stop them from rolling down. But she doesn't think this. She's a goddess herself.

As it is, she doesn't wonder about the pure humanity of bearing a handicapped child. She is simply dismayed and wonders how she can hide the newborn from the other gods. Especially Aphrodite, that bitch.

Something erratically burning inside of her urges her to the edge of the mountain's top with her son in her arms. She glances down, feels the familiar swoop in her stomach, but finds that it is soon replaced by the sheer dislike for the ugly creature that she's holding. She doesn't hesitate. She drops Hephaistos over the edge and sees him go. She sees him go all the way down.

She feels a change then.

But it's not completed until her son returns to Olympos, his ugliness only surpassed by his hate. He is so like her and she knows that if he had been perfect and his mother had been imperfect, he would've let _her _fall, too. He doesn't know it yet, but he has all of infinity to figure it out. He fights her at first. He hates all of them, those stuck-up gods high and mighty on their throne. He's naïve and young enough to see himself as something different, as if he's not the son of his father and his mother. But he is. And he falls prey to their soothing words.

He takes residence on Vesuvius and makes the mountain spew fire. She watches him often, and it is only after some times that she remembers that she is perched dangerously on the edge of Olympos to do so. She's not afraid.


	5. Sculptor

Prompt 21. Creative

**Sculptor **

He likes to lean over deeply into his work until his tattered hips smart with pain. There's pleasure in the pain; delving deeply into his carvings, body strangely twisted, Hephaistos feels as though the strength in his legs had been moved to his arms. The pain surging through his legs is nothing but reminder of his skill – rejected, undone, left to die and yet the only one that makes the earth spout fire. His legs are useless but nobody has arms like his. He had redefined divinity.

They all need him today.

He remembers what Zeus had told him before: "Give me a pestilence upon the humans. All-giving, all-seductive, all-destructive." The mountain's fire had shimmered in his eyes and Hephaistos had set to work.

The first things that had come to him were her words (_poisonous plague powerful_) and the mouth to put them in (_slow sensual soft_). He saw how she would bring her gift to humankind to her lips in hands wet with dew and men would think _she_ was the gift. He saw how the muscles in her throat would tense as she laughed, carrying around weightless infinite blackness in a beautiful jar.

She'd be her own victim, come to love herself more than anything else the gods had made. She would see herself as reigning queen and unleash everything that broke men in invisible places upon the world.

Limping, the volcano god shuffles around the ever-growing image of all that is beautiful and dies before your eyes. His legs throb with pain but his head is swimming euphorically. He creates her like sculptors would – except he doesn't love her, and he deforms her by making her beautiful. She's too beautiful. When she's staring down at him with eyes that can't blink yet, he breathes the fire of the mountain into her until something awakens inside her stone form. (She'll always be _stone_ cold and unrelenting)

"Pandora," he says, unsmilingly.

She can't speak yet.

Time to call the other gods.


	6. Mountain

Prompt 35: Enraged

**Mountain **

Hephaistos loves the mountains of Greece and Magna Graeca. They curve away sturdily and silently into a sky that's hard and blue overhead, like rock soldiers waiting for a general that has the fire to move them. Their lush, green coats are shaken off as easily as they grow back – but the mountains never move, they stay and their faces stay the same even as humans die and gods quarrel. He loves their silent presence that never goes.

He was thrown off Olympos as a child, the rich earth rushing up to meet him. All his life, he has never truly forgiven his mother for this – but silently, inside, he thinks this might be where his admiration for the mountains was born and he thanks Hera without speaking the words. (She'd do nothing but laugh anyway.) Olympos isn't his home, it never will be – but he respects and loves the mountain, with its steep slopes shrouded in swirling clouds, even if he doesn't respect or love its inhabitants. The most fickle of beings chose the most unchangeable of homes. The gods are crazy to believe they dominate Olympos – Hephaistos knows it's the other way around.

Of all the mountains on this beautiful land, that sighs under the terror of draught and fires or drowns in heavy rainfall, he loves Vesuvius the most. Vesuvius lies across the sea, where Greek explorers, aided by the gods (or plagued by them) landed and claimed the land as theirs. They claimed Vesuvius.

Vesuvius claimed Hephaistos from the very first look.

It's the barrenness (so unlike Olympos), the deathly yet so fertile landscape, the smoke rising in tendrils from hidden cracks, Hephaistos thinks. Vesuvius leads into the very guts of the earth, where the air rises in curling trembling gusts and rocks are reduced to molten debris. It hurts. It enslaves. It addicts. He uses the mountain's power to fulfil the god's warmongering needs. He only uses it, he doesn't take it, he doesn't create it. The fire is a gift and Hephaistos returns the favour by letting it do as it pleases. It's the only thing that fire is grateful for. After years and years, Hephaistos can finally touch the running river of fire without feeling any pain.

The people of the fertile slopes of Vesuvius thrive. The first settlers were awed by the proportions of the volcano and worshiped it like a life-giving god (_which it is_, Hephaistos thinks – moreso than he is, at least). They took its riches and offered servitude and admiration in return. Vesuvius purred like a contented tiger in those days.

But humans are prone to forgetting. Soon they remembered nothing but their own glorious history and forgot the mighty part of the mountain in it. They snatched away the grapes and the tomatoes and forgot to thank Vesuvius.

Hephaistos had to flee to escape the mighty explosions of anger. Vesuvius had warned him – had blown great black clouds of smoke into his face and into the steely sky, had rumbled like a mighty stomach. His great, bellowing shouts of anger had been heard all across the sea. The day fled, a perpetual night in its place. And yet, the people hadn't read the signs. They had stayed and gone to bed.

Their screams still haunt his dreams sometimes.


	7. Papyrus

Prompt 36. Enthralled

Warning: very vague implied sort of mental femmeslash. Plus a side of fictional historicism with our mythology.

**Papyrus **

An unrolled scroll of papyrus is lying suggestively on her pillow, its smooth pale surface gleaming with virginity and newness. Coming into the room, she spots it immediately – it's not where she left it, it's not in the corner where she had thrown it to the floor in frustration and anger. The scent of the clean paper clings to the sheets of the bed as she goes to sit on it. The papyrus stares at her, open, welcoming, its colour like the beautiful flesh of the soft breasts of Atthis and Anactoria.

Sappho feels her resolve slipping away. Inside her the warmth has already started to burn again; that pleasurable yet unbearable itch that is only soothed by writing – it has always been this way. Ever since Aphrodite looked upon young Sappho and saw what was hidden inside the girl. Aphrodite ignited the flame and keeps it alive. The goddess knows Sappho craves the pen and the ink like she does sex. Her place in it all is not muse (but Sappho still thinks it is).

Sappho reaches for the papyrus. Its weight is immensely satisfying in her hand, and already she feels the verses forming themselves, streaming from her limbs to her head – words of the colours and the land and the sex and Aphrodite. The poetess firmly grasps the papyrus, her head swimming with something that could resemble drunkenness – but the wine she's had at midday had been properly diluted to the customs of Lesbos. She's intoxicated, but not by wine.

"Why, Aphrodite, do you send me these words? Why do you compel me to retrieve my pen when I have already decided to throw it away?" she prays out loud, eyes fixed on the inkwell.

Psappho, my beloved Psappho, Aphrodite thinks, I do not. Your actions are your own.

Sappho puts the pen to the paper just as Apollo's chariot shows its face from above the clouds. The sudden warmth of the sun falling through the open windows fills Sappho's limbs with tingling pleasure, her eyes staring at the light. She's still praying, and now she's writing – not looking at the paper but at the sun. Inside her the words come to her like moths to a flame and her mind is full full full – and the sun and the light and the pen on the papyrus makes Sappho close her eyes and bite the inside of her cheek. Her skin is being touched, being loved by unseen hands; she feels like the pen, she feels like the paper.

No, Aphrodite thinks smiling, feel like the word, Psappho. You are the word.

Sappho's pen slips on the paper, leaving a thin streak of ink as the poetess grabs the sheets with her other hand and inside her something explodes, no, _everything _explodes, the colours the land the wine the sex the words.

Coming down from her high, Sappho sees the words she's written: _some say that the fairest thing upon the dark earth is a host of horsemen_

Smiling, she picks up the pen and writes.


	8. Heal

Prompt 89. Sick

**Heal **

"I thought the dead didn't contract diseases."

He huffed, even though the cool hand on her forehead stayed relaxed. "They don't. That is, if you don't consider death to be a disease."

She smiled in the dark, pushing her face up against his hand. It was soothing. "There is no cure for it, is there? Therefore, it is not a disease."

"Sometimes there is."

And she stayed silent at that, hazily remembering how Orpheus had played for them and how it had reminded her of her mother's hair and the sun on ripe grain. Already she was falling into a fever sleep again, in which the sun penetrated the underworld and Styx swallowed her.

He kissed her burning forehead. "You are not dead."

She slept.


	9. Impossible

Prompt: 7. Aroused

Rating: R

**I****mpossible **

He can't help but think sometimes: they are the perfect pair.

It's how they hold themselves, it's what they represent, it's how they are: opposites in every way, equal in their differences. Their conversations have the tendency to fall short – because they're too different, because they attract each other too much. He can only give her twenty words before his pulse quickens and he just has to have her, fuck her until they are too spent to speak. She's too much/not enough, he can't choose. He only knows that the sight of her makes his blood boil and his loins burn.

It is about sex, but further at the base of it is power. By birth they are placed at opposite ends of the world and they are driven by a desire to destroy what is different. It's insane; he worships her and her ways strange to him, yet he wants to see her conform. She longs for the same, wishes he would be like her while attracted to his otherness.

She: with her body like the sun and her hair like ripe grain, spends her day in wispy clothing amongst flowers and sex. Sex goes with her, her treacherous worldly companion. She's abundance, richness – the coming of spring, the shining seed, the orgasm.

He: with his only companion the disloyalty of passion, of impulse, prefers any battlefield over the bed of any woman. He goes to bed with nothing but war on him and he can't orgasm if he hasn't made her bleed in some way. He's inconsistency, flightiness – the knife, the kiss lined with teeth, the empty bed.

Do they love each other?

They meet by accident; the day is young and the flowers fresh.

"Don't you have some war to fight?" she says as way of greeting. Her body is open, accepting, waiting for the warmth of an early sun.

"Always," he answers gruffly, feeling on edge (it's what she does to him). Already her sun-crowned form makes him sweat. "Some wars are about spears, some are about flesh."

"Must you be such a man, Ares?"

"Would you prefer me to be a woman, then?" He knows the answer is no, despite Aphrodite's broad sexual interests. He knows she enjoys a woman's softness, caring, tenderness; he also knows she still craves, needs his roughness helplessly. It's about the difference. It's about power.

"Sometimes, yes."

"Not when I do this." He steps up to her and bites her neck, drawing blood, pressing his already painfully hard cock against her stomach.

She smiles without showing her teeth and shrugs her fine robe of silk off her shoulders. The sun is rivalled by the splendour of her body and Ares has to bite down on his tongue.

They don't even take the time to lie down. It's frantic, it's fast (it always is): she with her long, willowy legs clamped firmly around his hips, he thrusting into her cunt that was already wet and waiting. She scratches his back roughly and whines when he yanks at her hair. He's supporting her with one hand, kneading her breast with the other – and she's warm, and she's smooth and she comes easily. When she comes, she shudders and says nothing but "Man", but it's more than enough for him. Groaning, he thrusts upward one last time and spills himself inside of her. "Be mine," he sighs (although he means "be me").

"I am yours," she says (and she doesn't mean "I am you"). They kiss – slowly this time, without hurry.

Do they love each other? Yes, with the endless passion of impossible things.


	10. Dam

Prompt: 12. Broken

Rating: R

Warning: Andromache/Helen femmeslash

**Dam**

It was impossible not to want the fairest of all, so gifted by the golden Aphrodite. For Andromache, it was also impossible to like her. Helen the fair-haired from Argos was filled with self-pity and from her shapely lips fell only complaints and wishes to die. While Andromache envied the slim ankles and the tantalising shoulders in the simplest yet most elegant _peploi_, she also rather wanted to hit her sister-in-law over the divinely beautiful head with an amfora most of the time. Helen had driven Paris to desperate passion and despair and looking around she saw all around Helen fall the same way Paris had, even the most trusty of her own servants leaving her unfinished _peplos_ in its stand to weave for Helen. All the while, Helen cried and clung to Paris like dew does to a blade of grass when Eos rises. Andromache the white-armed disliked people who refused to acknowledge their actions. Helen had come here, the furious sons of Atreus at her heels, and she had to face responsibility as far as Andromache was concerned.

Because of the fact that when the two women met, Andromache experienced a mix of turbulent lust and stormy dislike, she avoided to cross the Greek woman's path and stayed out of the communal women's rooms when she knew Helen would be there, seducing everyone silently with her mere presence.

That was before, though. And things had changed. Helen was here now – had interrupted her haze of numb grief that hung over her like a bride's veil. The bride to a corpse.

Hector was dead and Andromache could not find the strength to greet Helen, let alone send her away.

"O Andromache," breathed Helen, her beautiful face the most turbulent of seas. She rustled over to the bed on which Andromache lay spent and naked, having torn her clothes from her limbs in the furious rage she had felt upon seeing the swift-footed Achilles kill the last family she had left. He had orphaned her all by himself. What of Skamandrios now? The boy had no father and a ghost as a mother. She wanted Helen to leave but could not form the words.

Helen was speaking, a string of soft soothing words like a river flowing out to sea. "You should not be alone right now, sister," she murmured and appeared to be untying her _peplos_, "you should be held and loved."

Hector was dead and Andromache's insides turned to ash as she inevitable felt her body react to Helen's careful lying down of her unclothed body to cover on side of Andromache fully, skin on skin.

"Cry," Helen said, trailing her white woman's hand over Andromache's ribs. Andromache tossed her head from one side of the pillow to the other in a grotesque 'no'.

"Let me help you then." Helen's words were a soft stream of warm air in her hair. She felt the other's woman's lips lightly move against her jaw and could not help but arch into Helen's hand as it softly pressed down on her breast. She had seen this scenario unfurl sometimes, in her dreams or in the highest point of pleasure with Hector inside her, but to have it happen was not right, was wrong was ungodly would kill them – Hector was dead and Achilles' chariot dragged him over the rough rocks of Ilion. Her beautiful beloved husband torn to shreds, Achilles' face a mask of anger – "No," she said to Helen, willing her body to stay still.

Helen placed her long fingers on her jaw, turned her head slowly and kissed her.

"Just let me help you, my sister," she whispered into Andromache's mouth, "let me break your dam of grief."

She sent her hand moving slowly down, following every dip and curve of Andromache's milk-white body. Andromache let out a breath she hadn't realised she'd been holding and tangled a hand in Helen's fair hair. She felt her sorrow trample around like a beast in a cage – she was the cage – and Helen's fingers stirring it to life. "Help me," she said then like a child.

Helen moved with the swift grace of a cat, swung herself astride the Trojana in one fluid motion. She held still for a moment, touched both her hands to Andromache's brow and smiled a small smile of reassurement. Then she kissed her, deeply, and slid her hands down Andromache's face and over the soft mounds of her breast. There she lingered for a moment, cupping the globes of flesh in her hands, lightly touching in a way that made Andromache ache. She trailed her fingers down the pale expanse of belly, then shifted her body down so that her hand had better access to where Andromache was already wet and hurting. Slowly, gently, she eased a finger in, then let it slip back wetly over the sensitive nub that made Andromache's body shake as if jolted by lightning. Rapid words in her Cilician dialect spilled from Andromache's lips as her body tensed. Helen repeated her actions relentlessly, went deeper, added a finger and twisted them inside her sister-in-law. Andromache had her eyes shut tight and was talking fast, words the Greek woman didn't understand save _Hector, Hector_. Soon Helen's skilful hands had Andromache trembling, every muscle in her body strung high and taut. Helen circled the other woman's clit, rubbing hard, and inside Andromache she curled one finger upward to brush a very sensitive spot – and the dams were breaking, Andromache's body spasmed wildly as she came hard with a soft cry. Her orgasm enveloped her like a sea of coiling pleasure, setting free her stiffly locked grief.

"Yes, like that," Helen said somewhere close to her face as she began to cry harshly in great shuddering breaths, as she wept like a child. She was unable to do anything as Helen disentangled her long limbs from her own. Through the haze of tears she couldn't see, but she briefly felt Helen's lips on her brow before she felt rather than saw the other woman tie her _peplos_ and leave her.

Hector, HectorHectorHectorHector. Andromache cried.


	11. Birds

Prompt: 71. Peaceful

**Birds**

Philemon is always happy to see the birds come. They're tiny and loud and the little females are brown and the little males are black-blue, puffing up their thin bird chests to impress the girls. They bring the sun on their wings and with it the weighing down of Philemon's branches with bursting, ripening fruit. The sun wakes every day a little earlier and warms the grain and his old tree trunk and the birds' nests. The most beautiful moment is when he wakes up one day – a different one each year – to the sun peeking over the temple and the encouraging twittering of parent birds. The babies jump fearlessly from his body, trusting Zephyros instinctively. If trees could smile, Philemon would.

Mostly he likes to see the birds come because he knows how much Baucis loves them. Before, she used to feed the birds every leftover they had – even if that wasn't much. She had her favourites that she, in the course of the years, taught how to sit in her hair and the hollow of her collarbone. One of Philemon's favourite memories is Baucis, sparkling with youth and her hair aflame in the sunshine, scooping up a young infant bird, not yet fully feathered, and reaching upward (so her blouse crept up and showed him a delicious stretch of olive skin) and putting the baby bird back in its nest.

Their eternal hug tightens slightly when the birds come. He feels her joy. He feels his own.

He loves the birds.


	12. Spring

Prompt 68: Nostalgic

**Spring **

She has seen a thousand springs and she will see a thousand more.

It is the busiest time of year for her, and for Eros, who is constantly on the move and only finds time to absently kiss her on the cheek when he passes Olympos. She knows he's thinking about falling in love himself.

She was in love and it went to waste – odd how her senses haven't dulled to this pain she has had dozens of time.

The earth reminds her of Adonis and she sees his name in the sky.

She throws herself at her duties forcefully and makes the deltas and phalli of humans everywhere throb. The season of sex. It used to be a heady, intoxicating time of pleasure on her own altars.

Light is leaping of every mountain, colours explode on every branch. Olympos shrouds itself in clouds of perfume and incense.

In the calm, warm touch of Zephyros, she finds no comfort than that of a lover gone.


	13. Apple

Prompt 55: Jealous

**Apple**

The funniest thing is that she doesn't remember a time when she didn't exist. Her mother, when drunk on too much nectar, likes to tell her the story of her conception – mid-lovemaking Zeus called the wrong name (maybe Europa, maybe Antiope, maybe Leto – there were so many, so many that had been here, and here, and here and so many that had been undone by their love). Hera clawed at his face even as she was impregnated with his seed. She spat in his face. He told her she was an utter bitch. She told him in return he could take his fantasies elsewhere.

It was a tale Eris doesn't need to hear; the dry droning of her mother's voice as she describes the hate.

Hera tells her daughter: "You were destined to be what you are because of us. We infused you with our hate."

Eris feels the need to drown her in the bowl of nectar – but then that's who she is, and she doesn't always act on her desires even if she feels them beat in her veins. She seethes in silence because that is what she does.

Despite the story of her conception, she can't remember when she didn't exist, she can't remember ever hearing of a time when she didn't exist. Thinking about it, she must have always been around because she is everywhere – ghostly fingers stretching out everywhere to mark human's hearts and make them beat with anger.

The thing about being a god, and being believed in, and being worshiped for what you do is that you _become_ what you do. Humans are small and insignificant but they, reliable and temporary and not worth remembering, at least have ways to grow in their life (even if their growth is snubbed out by the sudden silence of death). Eris feels superior to their tiny, antlike ways and yet is reminded of how stationary she is.

No change.

She is envious because she is envy. She doesn't laugh over the conflicts she incites because she wishes she incited other conflicts – like the one Aphrodite manages to create, or Hera, or Zeus. She doesn't enjoy seeing people break from their pitiful jealousy because she is never content and always on edge. She hates what she does because she wants to do something else.

She wants to change – she wants to be better, she wants to be more beautiful, she wants to be the best. She knows, somehow, she will never be any of those things. All she can be is envious.

She sighs and polishes the golden apple with her sleeve.


End file.
